Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have begun a campaign to eradicate poppy cultivation, aiming to wipe out the country’s massive production of opium and heroin, even as farmers fear their livelihoods will be ruined at a time of growing poverty. On a recent day in Washir district in southern Helmand province, armed Taliban fighters stood guard as a tractor tore up a field of poppies, the AP reports. The field’s owner stood nearby, watching. The Taliban, who took power in Afghanistan more than nine months ago, issued an edict in early April banning poppy cultivation throughout the country.
Those violating the ban "will be arrested and tried according to Sharia laws in relevant courts," the Taliban deputy interior minister for counternarcotics, Mullah Abdul Haq Akhund, told the AP in Helmand’s provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. Afghanistan is the world’s biggest opium producer and a major source for heroin in Europe and Asia. Production spiraled over the past 20 years despite billions of dollars spent by the US trying to stop poppy cultivation. But the ban will likely strike a heavy blow to millions of impoverished farmers and day laborers who rely on proceeds from the crop to survive.
The ban comes as Afghanistan’s economy has collapsed, cut off from international funding in the wake of the Taliban takeover. Akhund, the deputy interior minister, said the Taliban were in touch with other governments and non-governmental organizations to work out alternative crops for farmers. Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul Nafi Takor said the eradication campaign will take place across the country. "We are committed to bringing poppy cultivation to zero," he said. During their first time in power in the late 1990s, the Taliban also banned poppy cultivation and with a fierce campaign of destroying croplands nearly eradicated production within two years, according to the United Nations. (More Afghanistan stories.)
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